Nostos I&II (2026)

Nostos I (250 × 432 cm)
Nostos II (238 × 335 cm)
Sculptures formed with my body from enlarged photographic prints on 60 gsm paper of rooms from the house where I grew up, mounted on 300-micron aluminium.

Nostos is an Ancient Greek word meaning “homecoming” or “returning home”. It is also the title of a poem by Louise Glück about the impossibility of truly returning. I was particularly struck by its final line: “We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.”

I find it fascinating that the house in which you grow up is the only space you actually experience coming into being. After that, it becomes the reference point against which every other space is measured.

Because I cannot return to the house in which I grew up, I tried to reverse the process and bring those spaces into the present. Owing to their scale, I had to use my entire body to force these images from the past into my current reality. This failed attempt to bring my childhood back resulted in sculptures that are both fragile and imposing, occupying a great deal of space without ever fully becoming space.